Debian Weekly News - December 5th, 2001

We're Late. Yes, and we're awfully sorry for it.
Joey went out for International Linux Kongress (see below) and time was
too short writing up an entire issue in time, hence we decided to skip
one week and prepare a fantastic issue for this week.

Fixing GPM Bugs. Zephaniah E. Hull worked on GPM
recently, fighting against broken mice which ignore mice protocols and
send more characters than expected. Zephaniah publicly asked
for bug reports about problems with GPM and PS/2 mice. Even if these
bugs are filed as bugs already, please read his mail and provide all
information he needs.

Quality of Ximian's Debian Packages. Eric Van
Buggenhaut was playing with Ximian's Debian Packages, trying
to get Ximian's version of gdm compile. His fears include the
possibility that some of Ximian's packages could make it into Debian,
even though they lack proper maintenance, including: no
Build-Depends, no clean target in debian/rules and broken
debian/conffiles.

Automatic Building of non-free Packages? Adrian Bunk
started a discussion
about discrimination of non-free packages. It was noticed that
Debian's Build Daemons (buildd) don't seem to automatically build
non-free packages for all architectures, resulting in difficulties in
getting non-free packages to enter testing. Richard
Braakman and James
Troup (maintainer of nearly half a dozen buildds and ftp master)
explained why buildd's can't automatically build non-free
packages.

Freeze in Progress. The freeze for Woody is coming closer
which will definitively lead into a released Woody. Anthony Towns is
reviewing the situation of testing/unstable and reports
problems which the maintainers of these affected packages have to solve in
order to get their packages updated in testing. People who care about Woody
should read the debian-devel mailing list
frequently.

Interpretive Guidelines Regarding DFSG 3. Branden Robinson
proposed
an interpretation to the DFSG clause 3, that
covers modifications and derived works. His proposal reflects the current
situation where there are certain parts of packages that cannot be modified (e.g. license texts
and auxiliary material). Such auxiliary material was introduced by the GNU Free Documentation
License (GNU FDL).

Quick Reference for Debian. Osamu Aoki
(青木修) started a new
document named Quick Reference
for Debian GNU/Linux, which is distributed under the GNU FDL. This
document is mostly a collection of scripts which can be used as quick
reference. It covers many aspects of system administration including shell
command examples and configuration files. Many issues were picked up from the
debian-user mailing
list.

Freeze Update. Anthony Towns sent an update
of the freeze process. After December 9th, no changes (beyond minimal security
backports, or incredibly special exceptions) will be made to base packages in
Woody, and standard packages which have been dropped from Woody
won't be reinstated. See our last issue for details.

Removing LDP Documents? David Merrill, the Linux
Documentation Project coordinator, contacted
the Debian Project recently with concerns about LDP
documents (affecting packages doc-linux-html and doc-linux-text, plus the
various translations) having to be moved to non-free or removed due to license
issues. Unfortunately many LDP documents are encumbered by distribution
requirements. Many authors, however, are cooperating with David and are
relicensing their work.

Report from International Linux Kongress 2001. The Debian
Project had the opportunity to
run a booth and a developers' workshop during International Linux Kongress 2001
which was held at the University of Twente last week. Joey wrote a trip report describing some details of the meeting. More than a dozen
Debian people joined the conference, and were talking with each other about
various topics and exchanging GnuPG fingerprints. And, of cource, evening
meetings were always fun to attend.

Packages from NSA's SE Linux. Russell Coker spent some
time investigating SE Linux and assembling a couple of preliminary packages. In order to
benefit from the changes made to SE Linux you'll first need to have a kernel
with extra functionality booted. Russell has a patch prepared already.

Free Software in Russian Companies. A non-public conference
targeting Free Software in the business world was held in Moscow at the end of
November. Peter Novodvorsky
(Петр Новодворский) and Wartan Hachaturow from Debian attended the
conference and gave a talk about Debian.

One Small Step for Debian... We normally don't do
product announcements, but we thought it was worth mentioning that HP's
new line of Blade servers will debut with Linux before Windows versions
or HP-UX. Naturally, one of the GNU/Linux distributions available is
Debian GNU/Linux.
Unfortunately, the first models won't ship until January. Too late for
stocking-stuffers, but just in time for Valentine's...

New or Noteworthy Packages. The following new or
updated packages were added to the Debian archive since our last
issue.

wbd --
A multicast white board application that allows you to share a virtual white board with other people running wbd.

A Particularly Interesting Package... This one really
caught my eye, it's called "Vipul's Razor".
It's a distributed, collaborative, spam-catching and filtering program to
help weed out spam. It rates special mention because the more folks who
use it, the more efficient it will be. Anything that helps put an end to
spam is a Good Thing(TM).

Security Updates. Just one security issue to report
this week, be sure to update your systems if it affects you.